My OCD Subtype Keeps SHIFTING: 3 Steps to GENERALIZE Your ERP Skills | Ep. 463
In this episode, Kimberley breaks down why OCD themes shift so quickly and teaches you how to generalize your ERP skills so you can respond effectively—no matter what obsession shows up.
What You’ll Learn in This Episode
- Why OCD feels like a never-ending game of mental “Whack-A-Mole”
- The surprising reason new themes appear the moment you make progress
- How to spot the OCD cycle before you get pulled into it
- The #1 mindset shift that keeps you from feeling like you’re starting over
- Three evidence-based strategies to help you stop engaging with every new obsession
- How to use ERP skills across all OCD subtypes—without getting stuck in the content
If you’d like a more concise version, a more playful one, or a more clinical one, just tel
Why Your OCD Subtype Keeps Changing (and How to Generalize Your ERP Skills)
If you’ve ever felt like your OCD is playing an endless game of mental Whack-A-Mole, you’re not alone. Many people begin to make progress with one OCD theme—contamination, harm, perfectionism—only to have a brand-new intrusive fear appear out of nowhere.
It can feel discouraging, confusing, and even terrifying.
But here’s the good news:
No matter how often your OCD shifts themes, the treatment stays exactly the same.
And once you learn how to generalize your ERP skills, you no longer have to feel like you’re starting over every time a new obsession appears.
This article breaks down where shifting subtypes come from, why it happens, and three evidence-based skills you can begin practicing today to stop getting pulled into each new theme.
Why Does My OCD Keep Changing Themes?
OCD is often called “the ultimate trickster.” Instead of staying focused on one fear, it frequently jumps between themes, especially when you’re starting to get better at handling the current one.
This can look like:
- Contamination fears shifting into perfectionism
- Perfectionism becoming relationship OCD
- Relationship OCD shifting into moral or harm obsessions
- Or subtypes rotating every few months, weeks, or even minutes
This isn’t a sign of regression.
It’s a sign that OCD is trying new ways to keep you stuck in the cycle.
The content changes—
but the cycle stays the same.
Obsessions → anxiety/uncertainty → compulsions → temporary relief → reinforced cycle
Whether the fear is about germs, morality, safety, pregnancy, relationships, or identity, OCD relies on the same mechanism.
The only thing that changes is the storyline.
The Big Truth That Changes Everything
The content of your obsessions does not matter.
The treatment stays the same.
The moment you learn to recognize the pattern instead of the content, you get your power back. Every intrusive thought—no matter how “new,” “different,” or “urgent” it feels—goes through the same loop.
And that means you can respond to every single theme with the same plan.
Understanding the OCD Cycle
To generalize your ERP skills, you need to master the cycle itself.
The OCD Cycle Looks Like This:
- Obsession
An intrusive thought, feeling, image, sensation, or urge - Distress
Anxiety, uncertainty, disgust, or a “not-right” feeling - Compulsion
Internal or external behaviors to neutralize the discomfort
(ruminating, checking, avoiding, reassuring, self-criticism) - Temporary relief
You feel better—but only for a moment - Reinforced fear
The brain learns: “This thought is important. Pay attention next time.”
This cycle is the same whether your OCD is about:
- Harm
- Contamination
- Relationship doubts
- Perfectionism
- Scrupulosity
- Postpartum fears
- Sexual orientation
- Moral concerns
- Health anxiety
The theme can rotate endlessly, but the structure never changes.
Why Shifting Themes Feel So Urgent
OCD is crafty—and lazy.
It will always reach for whatever matters most to you: your relationships, your children, your values, your identity.
If one theme stops working, OCD throws out a new one.
Not because the new one is more important, but because:
It’s the quickest way to get you back into compulsions.
When you stop responding, OCD often escalates with:
- “But THIS one is serious.”
- “This isn’t like the other ones.”
- “You’d be irresponsible not to pay attention.”
- “Just in case, you should check…”
This is where most people get pulled back in.
And this is where generalizing your ERP skills becomes crucial.
3 Evidence-Based Skills to Generalize Your ERP
Here are the three core skills that help you stop chasing every theme and instead focus on the cycle—the part you can control.
1. Catch the Cycle (Zoom Out)
Your first job is to notice when you’ve been pulled into the loop.
When an intrusive thought feels urgent, meaningful, or dangerous, you’ll naturally zoom in on it—like a camera focusing too closely on a single detail.
Instead:
Practice zooming out.
Ask yourself:
- Has this pattern happened before, just with different content?
- Is this the same anxiety–compulsion loop in a new costume?
- Is my brain urging me to “figure this out” right now?
Catching the cycle early is the foundation of generalized ERP.
2. Don’t Touch the Content (Not Even a Little!)
The content is the trap.
And OCD wants you to take the bait.
The moment you try to analyze, solve, prevent, clarify, or disprove the thought…
you’re in the cycle.
Your job?
Don’t engage.
Not with reassurance. Not with rumination. Not with self-criticism.
Not with checking or avoiding.
A helpful mantra:
“This feels urgent, but I’m not touching the content.”
This includes:
- Not debating the thought
- Not trying to “figure out” what it means
- Not mentally confessing
- Not Googling
- Not replaying memories
- Not scanning for reassurance
- Not trying to make the anxiety go away
The less you interact with the content, the weaker the cycle becomes.
3. Practice Response Prevention (The Skill That Changes Your Brain)
This is the ERP part.
Once you’ve noticed the cycle and declined the invitation to engage with the content, your next step is to block the compulsion.
This means:
- Staying in the situation you’re in
- Allowing uncertainty
- Allowing discomfort
- Continuing your behavior without doing anything to feel “more certain”
Examples:
- Keep washing dishes while contamination fears scream at you
- Stay with your partner instead of overanalyzing your feelings
- Let the harm thought float by without checking your reactions
- Notice the “not-right” feeling without fixing or adjusting
Every time you block a compulsion, you:
- Build tolerance for discomfort
- Strengthen new neural pathways
- Reduce OCD’s grip
- Increase long-term relief and confidence
This is the heart of recovery.
The Mindset That Makes This All Work
Generalized ERP requires grit, repetition, and patience.
Most people get stuck because they:
- Resist a few compulsions…
- Feel no immediate relief…
- And then think: “This isn’t working.”
But the absence of instant comfort is proof that you’re doing the work.
ERP is about long-term change, not short-term relief.
You’re building a new muscle.
And it strengthens through repetition.
Watch Out for OCD’s Favorite Trick: “This One Is Different”
When OCD realizes its usual themes aren’t working, it gets louder and shifts again.
Its go-to strategy:
“This one is different. This one needs your attention.”
But when you zoom out, you’ll see:
- Same urgency
- Same discomfort
- Same compulsive urge
- Same loop
Different flavor.
Same mechanics.
Noticing this is a huge turning point in recovery.
Important Reminders as You Practice
These will keep you grounded and focused as themes shift:
1. Thoughts are not facts.
You don’t need to give every thought your attention.
2. ERP is the gold-standard treatment for OCD.
And it works even when the themes feel chaotic.
3. Don’t get caught in the content.
It’s just the bait. The cycle is the part that matters.
4. Be kind to yourself.
Generalizing ERP takes time. This is courageous, difficult work.
5. You can recover—even if your OCD changes themes constantly.
This is not a setback. This is part of the disorder, and part of the process.
The Bottom Line
Your OCD may change shape, but your skills don’t have to.
When you learn to:
- Catch the cycle
- Stay out of the content
- Prevent compulsions
…you can apply these tools to any intrusive thought, any theme, any moment of uncertainty.
OCD can flip-flop all day long.
You don’t have to.
Your response stays the same.
And that is what leads to freedom.
The podcast is made possible by NOCD. NOCD offers effective, convenient therapy available in the US and outside the US. To find out more about NOCD, their therapy plans, and if they currently take your insurance, head over to https://learn.nocd.com/youranxietytoolkit
Transcription: My OCD Subtype Keeps SHIFTING: 3 Steps to GENERALIZE Your ERP Skills
Welcome to your Anxiety Toolkit. I’m your host, Kimberly Quinlan. This podcast is fueled by three main goals. The first goal is to provide you with some extra tools to help you manage your anxiety. Second goal to inspire you. Anxiety doesn’t get to decide how you live your life. And number three, and I leave the best for last, is to provide you with one big, fat virtual hug.
Because experiencing anxiety ain’t easy. If that sounds good to you, let’s go help. My OCD subtype keeps changing. Today we’re talking about three steps to generalize your ERP skills. Now, have you ever felt like just when you start to make progress with your OCD theme, another one pops out of nowhere? It feels like whack-a-mole.
I don’t know if you’ve ever played the game of Whack-a-Mole, but when you manage one another, one pops up over here and you manage that one and another one pops over here. That is. So common. We often call it whack-a-mole obsessions, and we’re here to talk about it today. The majority of my clients have had this to some degree, and the thi here is one thing that one of my students said, and I thought it was so validating.
They said, all OCD is the ultimate trickster. It can flip flop all over the place and make your recovery feel like you’re constantly starting over. So ultimately what I’m here to tell you is. You don’t have to start from scratch each time, and what I’m going to give you today is an idea or an approach that you can use if you struggle with this sort of switching between subtypes.
And I’m gonna give you some specific tools. Three, in fact, that you can use. Anytime, anywhere, and hopefully you’ll use them with a lot of self-compassion. So let’s talk about the agenda today. In this episode, we are going to cover why your OCD subtype keeps shifting. We are going to cover how to generalize your ERP skills so that no matter how tricky they are, you have a plan and we’re gonna use evidence-based tools to do so.
Right? So this is not something I’ve made up. This is something that has evidence-based so that you can feel confident and prepared. So let’s get to it. Welcome to your anxiety toolkit. This is a podcast where I teach you everything I know about anxiety, so that you can go on to live your biggest, most beautiful life.
My name is Kimberly Quinlan. I am an OCD specialist in the Southern California area, and I have this mission to help people with anxiety suffer less. I’ve been there myself. I know what it feels like and my mission is to help you. Suffer a lot less or even just a little bit less. So let me tell you a real story about an actual client that I had, and hopefully you feel very understood and seen in this.
So I once started seeing a client when she was quite young. She had contamination OCD. She would wash her hands when she had the thought that she had dirt on her or that she would make her grandmother’s. When she was a teenager, her mom called me back and said, uhoh, the OCD is back. But this time it’s targeting perfectionism.
She feels like she has to reread things, she has to check things. What did we do? We did what? We’d already seen work. We practiced exposure and response prevention, and once again, she got better. I terminated and slowly reduced sessions with her and away she went to live her best life. But what happened is, again, I got a call.
This same client was now getting married and she was being targeted by relationship OCD this time, and it was really impacting her ability to plan her wedding and even commit to staying married. She was already planning the divorce before she’d even gotten married because she was so, so overwhelmed. By this new subtype of OCD.
Now we learn our lesson. This time we had seen that, okay, this has shifted themes quite a few times, even though your ERP has been very effective after some years, which is great by the way. She went on and lived an amazing, got all of her goals met and her values met, which is awesome. But we knew as she started to do family planning that we would need to prepare for her OCD to come back.
And so what we did is when she got pregnant, we did, of course notice. This obsession. We had obsessions back about contamination. We had pedophilia, obsessions, we had postpartum obsessions, we had harm obsessions. We had all of the obsessions. But the cool thing is we had a plan. We were already expecting this to happen, and we knew what we needed to do.
If this sounds familiar to you. I’m hoping it does because it’s a really important part of OCD recovery. Now, what I’m here to tell you is that maybe your OCD used to focus on contamination, and now it’s moral OCD or harm OCD. Maybe it switches every few months, maybe it switches every few minutes. That’s also very, very normal.
It can feel really terrifying. I totally, totally understand. Um, and it can actually convince you. That you’re never going to get better, but that is not true. Again, we just have to make a generalizing shift in your approach. So the truth is here, this is the main point I want you to take away, but we’re gonna talk about how to do this as we move forward.
The truth is, no matter the content, the treatment always stays the same, and we can actually generalize the treatment so that no matter what shows up. Again, your ERP skills are gonna be incredibly helpful. Now again, we just need to generalize these skills, and we’re going to break that down now. So let’s first look at the mechanisms of OCD.
So if you’re following me here, you know the OCD cycle. I talk about it in all of our courses, on all of our YouTube videos. I talk about it on social media all the time. This is what the OCD cycle looks like. It starts with an obsession, an intrusive thought. Feeling sensation, urge or image. And when you have that, you feel an intense degree of anxiety or uncertainty or some form of discomfort.
Maybe it’s discussed or just a not right feeling. When we have that, we always engage in these compulsions to reduce or remove them, which does give us temporary relief. But when we have that relief, we actually reinforce the obsession and now we’re stuck going round and round and we don’t break out of that cycle.
Now what you have to remember is. That same exact cycle happens no matter whether you have relationship OCD, you have postpartum obsessions, harm obsessions, whether you have sexual orientation obsessions or scrupulosity or contamination or health anxiety, whether you have panic disorder, it. Doesn’t matter.
It’s the same exact strategy used by OCD. You have an intrusive thought feeling or sensational urge. You have discomfort. You have to engage in the same five types of compulsions to get relief. But that relief reinforces this cycle. And now you are stuck. And what I want you to remember here is regardless of the theme, all compulsions have the same goal.
They all do the same mechanism. These are OCD tricks I want you to be memorizing. These are what we would call OCDs goals, OCD if we were to sort of externalize OCD is it wants you to do compulsions. It wants you to keep ruminating. Checking, asking for reassurance, avoiding, or beating yourself up. Those are the top five compulsions and that’s what is going to urge you to do immediately.
It’s going to always try to keep you hypervigilant and focused on just in case. It’s gonna be like, just in case you better do it just in case, you know, I know this is probably not gonna happen, but just in case you should do this compulsion. That’s the the goal and the trick of OCD. It also is always gonna create more drama if you do not adhere to its demand.
So if you are like, no, no, no, I’m not gonna do these compulsions, it’s going to get louder. And that’s often when it does switch themes, and we’ll talk about that more here in a little bit. And so, of course, in every episode of your anxiety toolkit, I wanna give you an anxiety toolkit to use to take with you, and so you can practice this for homework.
So let’s talk about it. When you feel like your OCD subtype keeps shifting, you have to remember, it’s all just content. Go back to that OCD cycle. Every single subtype has the exact same cycle. The only thing that changes is the content of the obsession. Maybe you’re having intrusive thoughts about harming, or maybe you’re having intrusive thoughts about things being perfect.
Or not praying right? Or that what if you get sick or it doesn’t feel right, like the list goes on. The content of the obsession is the only thing that changes. We do the same discomfort, have the same uncertainty, we have the same anxiety, we have the same disgust, we do the same five compulsions, we get the same relief, and then we reinforce the OCD exactly the same.
The only thing that differs. Is the content, and the content is simply just words. One day it’s what if you want that person to die, and the next time it’s like, what if you purposely harmed them the next time? It’s like, what if you prayed wrong next time? It’s like, what if you want. To pray wrong, right?
Like that’s the nature of OCD, the content, those words, those simple words is what is different, and it’s all about that content. So what I want you to remember here as we move forward, is I want you to be kind. This is tricky work. It requires you to become. A trickster back with OCD. You have to like think.
Big picture when we talk about generalizing ERP, we have to think wider and broader and more abstract when we’re having these shifting OCD subtypes. And you’re gonna have to be really kind with yourself because this does not come natural to us, OCD folks, and it’s going to take some time. So let’s talk about how you can be tricky too.
Number one, your job is to simply catch the repetitive. Cycle, catch how it twists and turns the content we’re going to then work at not engaging in the content. I don’t want you to touch that content with a 10 foot pole. I want you to get so good at observing when that content shows up and being like, ah, you almost tricked me there.
You almost got me with the content, but I am not engaging with that content. You’re gonna have to be willing to be really uncomfortable and to be really uncertain, because again, it wants you to do a compulsion. So you can remove that discomfort or remove that uncertainty, and you’re gonna have to recognize the urge to solve or figure it out as a part of that cycle.
And remember that this is not a special case. This is OCD playing exactly the same tricks, but just with different content. So I always use this metaphor with clients and I hope it’s helpful for you. I actually created this image with AI and I love it. I think he’s exactly how I imagine him. So I always think about OCD when I’m talking with kids, but with adults too, and I think of it on my own.
I always think of OC as this like little monster that sits on my shoulder and he’s green. He looks just. Like this, and he’s really lazy and he’s really mean, and he’s really like a trickster, right? He’s mischievous, but he wants to be lazy. He doesn’t want to expend a lot of energy sending, you know, getting you all flipped out and freaked out.
He’s going to use the lazy approach by using the fears that you already have or using the values that you have to get you to do compulsion. That’s his job. He’s like, I’m tired. I wanna chill on the beach. I wanna sip my margarita. And so I know Kimberly really cares about her children, so I’m gonna throw her a fear about that.
’cause I know that’s an an easy win. She’ll definitely do compulsions if I tell her that, you know, you just in case you better do. Right? And so he throws you a thought. Your children. Okay? Now your job is to catch this trick and be like, oh, I see you just pulled out the easiest laziest approach to get me to move.
I’m not falling for it this time. OCD. Okay, so if you are looking for effective OCD or BFRB treatment, that’s covered by insurance. I’m thrilled to announce to you this week’s sponsor no cd. No CD provides live face-to-face video sessions with licensed therapists who specialize in OCD and related conditions.
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Now when you do that, I always imagine he kind of like sits up in his chair a little bit and he looks left and right and he’s like, what? Kimberly’s not falling for it. This is odd. I I can always switch it and if she doesn’t care, so this is fine. He’ll be like, this is fine, this is fine. I know what’s gonna happen.
Maybe. Maybe she didn’t fall for that one, but I do know that she really, really loves her husband, and I know she has got some anxiety about her marriage. And so, okay, I’m just making this up by the way, and he’ll be like, okay, I’m just gonna throw a thought at her that maybe she doesn’t love him enough.
That’ll get her going. Okay, cool. I’ll just switch the content. So he throws that out. And of course I’m like, oh, yeah, that really does matter to me. I would be thinking, oh, it would be really irresponsible if I don’t pay attention to that, so I better just give this someone attention. But if I don’t give it an attention, he’s gonna be like, wait a second.
What’s going on? She didn’t fall for that one either. Right? And so what’s he gonna do? He, he’s gonna throw you the next obsession. That’s what he does. Now, there might be times where I’m really caught up in one obsession. Let’s say it’s health anxiety, and I’m really doing a lot of compulsions and I’m fully in the cycle and I’ve fallen off the wagon with my ERP.
That happens for everybody. And he’s like, yeah, like, okay, like she seems to be doing okay and this is, you know, I’ve gotta do a la com. I’m just kind of bored. And he might throw you a new obsession. Anyway, so this is how it functions. You are gonna have to get really good at observing the lazy tricks of OCD.
Now, if you don’t like externalizing it and sort of telling this sort of story, that’s fine, but I find that visual really helpful to think about. Like he’s lazy. He wants to sit back and enjoy his margarita and just chill in the sun, and so he’s going to throw the thing out that you value the most. Your job is to get really good at not buying into that content.
Now, we talk a lot about this in your OCD toolkit, which is an online course that we have That step by step teaches you exactly how to practice ERP from the very beginning, all the way through exactly how I teach my clients. If you’re interested in that, head over to cbt school.com/. Your OCD toolkit, and if you’re a clinician and you wanna learn how to use ERP with your clients, you can head over to CBT school.
We also have a course called the clinician’s OCD toolkit where we have continuing education units. We are covered by NBCC to provide treatment trainings for clinicians. And we go way in depth. We talk about this so in depth, so you will love that resource. But in the meantime, let’s talk about skills.
Let’s talk about actual toolkit. Number one, we’ve already talked about it, is you’re going to need to practice catching the cycle. This is going to make you, uh, zoom out. You’re gonna have to pretend like you’re a camera. When you’re really zoomed in on a thought that’s you’re having urgency around and you’re having a lot of anxiety and uncertainty around, and you’re feeling a strong urge to do compulsions, you’re gonna have to pause and be like, wait.
I think I’m stuck, and you’re gonna have to zoom back out and catch that. This is the same cycle OCD uses in every subtype I have for every person that has OCD, right? This is, you’re not alone. There’s a large percentage of people, thousands and thousands of people with OCD where this same exact. Cycle plays out and your job is to catch the cycle.
The next step here is to practice not engaging. I say do not touch it with a 10 foot pole. If it comes up, and again, I’ll repeat this, if there is an intrusive thought that comes with a lot of urgency, that is not in line with your values, that is repetitive, like really relentless, and you feel an urge to do any of those five compulsions, right?
It’s OCD. Right. If it’s making you check, if it’s making you ask for reassurance or avoid, or it’s making you ruminate over and over and try and solve something. If it’s making you beat yourself up, it’s gonna be your OCD and we’re gonna have to practice not engaging with it. We want to avoid that grumpy old monster that we talked about so much that he.
Like spins out and passes out because he is just so overwhelmed with the fact that you aren’t playing with him anymore. Now the last thing, oh wait. I’ve actually got something really important that I’m gonna tell you here is let’s first talk about mindset. Mindset is going to be key because this work is going to take grit.
You are going to have to be able to practice this over and over. The thing that I have found my clients get the most stuck on here is they do it once. And they don’t engage. Then they do it twice because another thought, remember that O CD Monster is like, wait, wait. I better bring out the big guns. Is they maybe 2, 3, 4 times they’re practicing it and then on the fifth time they’re like, this isn’t working.
I give up. I’m gonna do the compulsion. You’re gonna have a mindset of being. Ready and prepared for your intrusive thoughts and obsessions and subtype to move. Remember my client I told you about, she worked really hard at being prepared for all. We knew the areas that OCD was gonna trick her in. In fact, it tricked her in areas she didn’t even know.
But she was prepared and ready to do this on repeat. So now if we move on to the. Third science backed strategy. It is going to be response prevention. Now remember in that OCD cycle where we talked about compulsions, your job is going to be to practice not engaging in any of these compulsions. No matter how many of these subtype obsessions you have, no matter how many intrusive thoughts you have, or intrusive urges you have, or intrusive images you have, and you’re gonna practice not engaging with any compulsions either to try and reduce or remove that obsession.
So that might be getting back into the thing you were doing. So let’s say you were doing the dishes. All of a sudden you start having contamination fears. You stay doing the dishes, you let the thoughts be there. You are willing to be uncertain, and you get really firm on, I am not gonna ruminate about this.
I am not gonna beat myself up about this. I am not going to ask for reassurance about this. I’m not gonna check. I’m not going to do any physical compulsions. So we’re really gonna double down on that response prevention. Now, once again, I will say we go deep into this on our course. I don’t mean to be like repetitive in that.
I don’t want you to feel like I, this is a sales. Pitch, but it is important that you get really clear on what those compulsions are. So if you’re not in treatment, I do encourage you to have a very good list of the compulsions you tend to get engaged in so that you can resist that compulsion. Now, of course, I’ve talked about this.
Uh, already, but please have patience. This work sucks. It’s not easy, it’s not fun. It is, uh, muscle in your brain that we are strengthening, and you do have to remember that you’re going to need to practice this on repeat. I often say to my clients, if you’re doing this on repeat and you’re going, okay, I’m going through those three steps, and then I have to do those three steps again, and then I have to do those three steps again with the next top subtype.
That is proof. That you are doing good work. That is proof. I’m gonna say it again. It is proof that you are doing the most courageous, badass work that we could ask you to do because you are not engaging. You’re doing your response prevention, you’re seeing how it’s pulling you in and you’re changing your behavior.
What do we do when we change our behavior? We change our brain, we change the neuro pathways in our brain. And so we wanna have a lot of patience with ourselves as we do this. And we wanna also know you will suck at it and you will fail at it. And that is totally normal. We’re not here to judge you. That is a normal part.
You just keep on practicing. So here is something I want you to watch out for. Is OCD is really tricky at telling you this one is different, what it’s going to do. Imagine that. Go back to that little monster on your shoulder. If it’s tried to get you back engaged, it’s pulled out the things you care about the most, your biggest vulnerabilities.
It knows what your weaknesses are and so it’s gonna throw it at that. Yeah. If you still don’t budge, he’s gonna have to sit up in his beach chair and put his margarita down and be like, whoa. I’m gonna actually have to get to work here. And so what’s the easiest thing it can do? It can say this one is different.
I know in the past the, you know, maybe that was your city, but this one No, no, no, no. This one is serious and different and you really would be irresponsible if you do not engage with this one. ’cause this one is really important. Very, very tricky. OCD loves to convince you that this fear is real and it’s urgent.
It really loves to tell you that you’re being irresponsible. If you don’t do this, you’re a bad person. If you don’t do this, you know it knows again where our weaknesses are and it will always have you do what we call just in case compulsions, just in case you’ll be able to really enjoy the party. If you just do this one compulsion, then you can go off and live your very relaxed life.
Just do this one compulsion is what it’s gonna say. Very, very tricky. Okay, so what we want to say to OCD is, yes, this feels new, but it’s still OCD. I know what to do here, right? It’s you being able to identify the cycle. Now, we don’t wanna go into overusing like this is just my OCD, and this is just my OCD, because that can become a compuls.
We don’t wanna get caught in that, where you have to keep repeating to yourself. It’s just OCD, it’s just OCD, it’s just OCD. What we wanna do is we wanna be able to use a language where we have this wisdom and this insight as to, uh, I can see this pattern. When I feel uncertain and I have these intrusive thoughts, I always go into this pattern and this pattern never works.
The more compulsions I do, the more stuck I feel. The more lack of confidence I have, the more I feel completely hopeless about this situation. I know what to do. I’m gonna do a 180 U-turn and I’m gonna change how I respond. This is the work that I want us all to be doing. Now there are some things I want you to remember before we move on.
Number one. Thoughts are not facts. Just because you have an obsession doesn’t mean you have to give it your attention. We also wanna remember exposure and response prevention is the gold standard treatment for OCD. Again, if you have not got access to an ERP therapist, please go to your OCD toolkit and we will teach you what you need to do and you can do it in your own timeline.
Number three. Do not get caught in the content, right? That is a trap Number four, please be kind. This is hard work. This is challenging work, and it does require you to practice that part of the muscle of the brain where you zoom out and you see this for what it is, and I want to remind you, you can recover.
Even if your OCD switches from one subtype to the next all day long, there is still the same treatment that you’re gonna use. You’re just gonna apply it and generalize it. To all of those different thoughts and not treat one thought as if it’s more important than the other. You’re just gonna treat them all the same, right?
With the same response and the same degree of non-I importance and the same degree of non-judgment and the same degree of compassion. And if you start to do that, you will start to see some shift. Thank you so much. I know how important and valuable your time is. As always, it is a beautiful day to do hard things and I cannot wait to see you in the next episode.
Have a great day everybody. Please note that this podcast or any other resources from cbt school.com should not replace professional mental health care. If you feel you would benefit, please reach out to a provider in your area. Have a wonderful day, and thank you for supporting cbt school.com.
